Le retour de l'Espagne
Trip Start
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Trip End
Ongoing
Pau, France
Monday, September 24, 2007
Our study abroad group, USAC, went on a field trip across the border to Spain for Friday and Saturday. We spent the first night in San Sabastian, a beautiful city roughly twice the size of Pau right along the northern coast of the country. All of the students who are currently taking the comparitive modern literature course kept talking about the San Sabastian beach as being the setting of a scene in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, unread by moi. In the book, Hemingway's character swims out to a floating dock less than two hundred meters from the beach and does something cool. Probably drinks a bottle of wine. Anyway, my friend Dylan and I swam out to what was perhaps the very dock that Hemingway was inspired to write about in his novel. Once I reached the base, I stood up, thrusting my fists toward the sky, and yelled, "Hemingwayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!" at the top of my lungs. Never have I felt more connected with the spirit of American expatriate writers. After Dylan and I regained our breath, we plopped ourselves down the baby blue baby slide located on the edge of the dock, which Hemingway apparently forgot to mention, and returned to shore.
I had my first dream in French last night. In it, my host mom, Soline, was teaching me a new French word as usual. It felt so real. The problem of course is that I am incapable of teaching myself new French vocabulary that I don't already know, even in dream-world. So what Soline was teaching me was pure nonsense. The word was "turdur," which perhaps bears some resemblance to the word for turtle, "tortue", which I just recently learned. It's too bad that I spent so much time in my dream practicing the pronunciation of a fake word. If I'm going to spend both my entire waking and sleeping hours studying French, then I might as well practice something useful, like the pronunciations of "bonne soirée" or "preférerais". Those are harder than they look.
I showed my family a "sandwich typique des Etats-Unis", my personal favorite, peanut butter and banana. The two younger boys really took to it, despite their unfamiliarity with peanut butter. They already love bananas though; and of course bread is more popular than Rugby here in Pau, so it wasn't really much of an acquired taste. Other popular fruits in the household include pears, grapes (always seeded), canteloupe, and kiwis. As I was shaving off the skin of my kiwi this morning, the thought crossed my mind that if I ever hired a personal chef to prepare some sort of delicacy for my, I might hire a kiwi peeler. I know some people like to eat the hairy skin, but that's disgusting. I was satisfied with my decision for some moments until I took the first bite of my kiwi, and then the thought struck me, "Maybe kiwis aren't actually delicious enough to deserve such special care from a hired professional. Maybe kiwis just aren't that good." But then I took a few more bites after that and I changed my mind again. I love kiwis. I would definitely hire a kiwi peeler.
C'est tout pour maintenant. Au revoir!
zill
ps. im going to go by the pen-name zill from now on because, the way these French key boards are arranged, the z is where the w should be, the q is where the a should be, and the m is locqted zhere the ; should be. Takes a few days to get used to.
